Technology adopter

I would like to consider myself as being hip and on top of things when it comes to technology, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that I came to the game late on quite a bit of new technologies.  Case in point:

- I didn’t have a cell phone till my senior year of high school while most of my friends had them two and three years before that.  I was never really opposed to them, I just didn’t really see the need for it.  I still kind of hate the fact that anyone can come into contact with me at any point, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t last a couple days without my cell phone.

- I didn’t buy an iPod until the third generation, which is surprising because listening to music is what I spend the majority of my time doing.  I was always a “CD purist.” Yes, I am one of those elitist audiophiles who thinks the sound quality on a CD is better than on a compressed mp3.  But once I got my iPod, I never parted with it.  It seriously changed the way I listen to music.  My iPod was stolen last fall and I thought the world was over.  I still believe CDs have much better sound quality but the fact that I can take my entire CD collection anywhere and listen to it at anytime has made my iPod basically my most valuable possession.

- I just recently got an Xbox 360 last week and its the first gaming console I have bought since Nintendo 64.

I’m not really sure where this puts me as far as technology adopter goes.  I’m not really opposed to new technologies, usually I am pretty fascinated by them.  I just am always really skeptical at first.  I like to wait a couple months or years and gauge people’s reactions to the new technology and figure out whether or not it is worth my time.

Why I’m doing this

I remember when Livejournal first came out and how opposed to blogging I was.  Upon discovering the site, I found out from a friend that my ex-girlfriend had a blog on there.  I had just broken up with her so, as you can imagine, I had to know what she was saying about the breakup and me.  I read pretty much every post and it was basically all hate speech directed at me (which, of course, I found to be highly entertaining).  The thing that struck me about it though was that I couldn’t believe how honest and open she was being on a website that basically anyone could find and read if they wanted to.  She had basically uploaded her entire diary and personal thoughts onto this website for everyone in the world with an internet connection to view and mull over.

This is pretty much why I was opposed to blogging in the beginning.  Why would someone want the whole world to have the opportunity to find and know their most personal thoughts? It seemed absurd to me.

I soon came to realize that the blogging world is a whole lot bigger than just the “My boyfriend broke up with me! ” diaries that were basically every teen girl’s blog who originally signed up for Livejournal.  Blogging has turned into a way for every person with an internet connection to have a voice.  So of course, with that you’re going to get a lot of bad, but you’re also going to get a lot of good as well.  There are pretty much blogs about just about every subject you can think of now and a lot of them are quite useful for gathering information.

Blogging is important because it has made possible the transfer of thoughts and ideas from many different types of people who, before blogs, didn’t really have a resource for doing this.  Blogging helps us as humans to communicate and learn from each other.

This blog hopefully will be of some use.  This will be my first real blog ever and I hope to provide useful information and thoughts on modern innovations and technologies.